Contras Killed Civilians, Villagers Charge

When U.S.-backed rebels fought their way into this frontier garrison town at dawn the other day, they went door to door asking where the Sandinista soldiers lived.

At the one-room shack of militiaman Jose Domingo Martinez, a flimsy structure of logs and plastic sheeting, three of the invaders crouched in the doorway and fired automatic weapons inside, according to another soldier who watched from 50 yards away.

Four hours later, when the contras had retreated, Martinez returned home from his combat post to find his wife and 3-year-old son among the 30 dead on both sides.

“They were gunned down right there in the house,” the 25-year-old soldier said, weeping as he touched their closed wooden coffins. “The men who killed them know me. They were in the militia here before they joined the other side.”

In the rebel view, Thursday’s attack signaled a stepped-up campaign against military targets. While 80 Sandinista defenders held off about 250 contras, the town’s hilltop army barracks was hit by gunfire and part of the adjacent command post’s roof was blown off.

But residents of the town and two nearby farming hamlets said Friday that the rebels also burned 12 houses, abducted two entire families, stole 100 cattle and killed six civilians, including three children, along with nine government soldiers.

Both fighting prowess and the human rights record of the contras are at issue as the Reagan Administration prepares to ask Congress to give them more military aid. The rebels have been criticized for focusing on civilian targets.

Thursday’s raid was a bold attack on a major army outpost, aided by weaknesses in the Sandinista defense. The town, 167 miles northeast of Managua, is a staging point for counterinsurgency battalions that pursue the contras along their infiltration routes through mountainous jungles from base camps in nearby Honduras.

Several soldiers here said the contras had told peasants in the area they were planning to seize San Jose de Bocay this week and distribute food free to its 3,000 residents.

The garrison asked Wednesday for reinforcements, but a 200-man counterinsurgency unit camped a few miles from town said it never got the message because its radio failed. When the unit heard shooting Thursday, it marched toward San Jose de Bocay but was bogged down by a rebel ambush.

Lt. Diobigildo Sanchez, the garrison commander, said the rebels entered from both directions on the town’s only road while raining grenades from the hills above.

He said 15 contras died in the fighting, but displayed only four of their bodies. They were sprawled in the mud, barefoot and shirtless, in the town’s coffee warehouse.

“Bocay will never surrender,” read a freshly spray-painted slogan on the warehouse facade.

Friday was proclaimed “Day of Joy” throughout Nicaragua to mark the eighth anniversary of the fall of President Anastasio Somoza in an insurrection that brought the Sandinistas to power two days later.

In San Jose de Bocay, mourners gathered solemnly inside the dark warehouse, where corpses of the nine soldiers killed in the fighting lay under blankets of flower wreaths.

At an army field hospital a block away lay 12 soldiers and 18 civilians who were wounded. They included several children hit by grenade shrapnel while crouching in trenches outside their homes.

Townspeople said most of the civilian casualties were caused by distant rebel fire. They said the rebels chose carefully which homes to burn, but made sure the occupants were out first.

Nine of the houses belonged to militiamen on the government’s Heroes and Martyrs collective farm just outside town and two private cattlemen.